Will The Pirate Bay Sink?

In the biggest case since Napster, a landmark ruling in a Swedish court has found The Pirate Bay guilty of copyright infringement by making 33 protected files accessible for illegal file sharing.

Defence lawyers for Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde argued that they should be acquitted since The Pirate Bay does not host any files and simply provides a bit torrent search engine. The court ruled that all four defendants be sentenced to one year in jail and fined $4 million; an amount that will be shared amongst companies including 21st Century Fox, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI.

Although the award fell short of the $17.5 million the industry was claiming, John Kennedy, chairman the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said:

There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde stated:

It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were convicted as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.

The Pirate Bay’s founders will appeal against the ruling and the site remains active with the unusual home page message “Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. :-)”. The Swedish authorities have no legal power to take the site down since it is hosted on various data centres around the world.

It is unlikely the media companies will ever receive money but they have always insisted the case was about awareness and education. So will it stop internet piracy?

The Pirate Bay is possibly the most well-known torrent tracker site and this case has brought them even more publicity. Ironically, it may bring further “awareness and education” about bit-torrent technology (most of the press are publishing helpful guides!) Could the ruling also mean that other search engines, such as Google, are convicted of copyright infringement for linking to a site that hosts or promotes illegal material?

Victory celebrations by the film and music industry are likely to be short-lived. In reality, there are many torrent search engines. Perhaps the media companies should embrace modern digital distribution methods rather than make futile attempts to block individual channels?

Do you think this verdict will make any difference to internet piracy?

Craig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's written more than 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler